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In a controversial move two days ago, Twitter suspended the account of Santiago Swallow.

Who is Santiago Swallow? Well, if you have to ask, you’re obviously not keeping in touch with what is going on in the world.

The 42-year-old Swallow was born in Mexico, but then moved to the US to become one of the most revered gurus of the internet age. He has been described as ‘one of the greatest thinkers of the Millennial generation’.

Despite being in his 40s, Swallow retains his youthful appearance – his piercing eyes and blond mullet lend him the look of member of Duran Duran. But don’t be fooled by his image – Swallow is a serious player in new media. His upcoming book is predicted to define a generation. He has wowed delegates with his speeches at the TED and SXSW conferences.

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He has more than 85,000 followers on Twitter. Or rather, he did have until Twitter suspended his account this week. But why would Twitter close the account of one of the most brilliant social media minds in the world?

The fact that Santiago Swallow doesn’t exist probably had something to do with it.

In the world of social media, the truth can be a sketchy business. Twitter is coming down with media gurus who claim to have tens of thousands of followers. Many of them do. Some of them, however, are twisting the system, buying up followers in a bid to boost their reach and influence.

Santiago Swallow was created to prove how easy it is to hoodwink users of social media and those who identify its key influencers.

He revealed how the process took just two hours last Sunday. He started by using software designed for authors to randomly generate the name of his creation – ‘Alonzo Arbuckle’ and ‘Leon Ling’ didn’t quite make the cut (yes, the alliteration setting was selected).

A Gmail account was created for Santiago Swallow and a Twitter account immediately followed. Then it was time to fill that Twitter account with followers. But what do you do when you don’t have more than a few minutes to become influential? Buy them, of course.

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It didn’t take long for Ashton to purchase Swallow some 90,000 followers, all for the price of $50 (£33). An automated tweeting service was used to broadcast his thoughts to the world.

According to his – now defunct – Wiki page, Swallow is ‘a leader in the development of source awareness and has dedicated himself to helping others know more about media and personality can manipulated in the 21st Century’.

He started to take on a life of his own as a kind of faux intellectual Latino techtrosexual playboy

However, Twitter only suspended @SantiagoSwallow after Ashton revealed all in his article, and not before Swallow reached an influence score of 754 out of 1,000 with social media analysis company Kred.

Ashton, from Birmingham, was researching people with suspiciously high Twitter follower counts when he came up with the idea.

‘Inventing a character and buying him followers seemed like a good way to bring the story to life,’ he told Metro.

‘Many of the people who seemed to be faking a reputation on Twitter were trying to sell services as experts, so I wanted to make him an expert of something. Given the type of story it was, I wanted it to be hip and digital, so I created a field of “imagined self” and made him a parody of a tech hipster. After that he started to take on a life of his own as a kind of faux intellectual Latino techtrosexual playboy.’

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Ashton said there are individuals on Twitter with a surprisingly large number of followers who brand themselves as experts in something in order to sell self-published books or their own consultancy services.

‘Most people assume a large following on Twitter means you are well known in your field,’ he said. ‘If I tell you I am an expert in something but only 20 people follow me on Twitter, you might not believe me. If 20,000 people follow me on Twitter, I am more credible — as long as you don’t look too closely.’

He said we shouldn’t take people at face value online without first checking out the facts behind the followers.

But what does the future hold for Santiago Swallow?

‘I don’t know how long he could have gone if we hadn’t blown the whistle,’ said Ashton. ‘Fake followers generally drop off as Twitter identifies them or people report them for spam, but you can always buy more.

‘I found lots of individuals selling their expertise online who appeared to have a lot of fake followers, so I suspect some people get away with this for a fairly long time.’

Fake Twitter followers are spreading. Justin Bieber may have 38m followers, but only 47 per cent of them are genuine, according to research from Socialbakers.

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Ashton said we are becoming more savvy.

‘Understanding how you can fake things – and therefore how you can spot fakes – is gradually spreading from tech experts to the rest of us,’ he said.

‘It only takes a few gullible people for the scam to work though, so people will always be trying to get away with something, just as we still get crazy email forwards from elderly aunts and spam about opportunities to make parts of our bodies bigger.

‘Most of us know to ignore that stuff now — I think nearly everybody catches on fairly quickly.’

Read Kevin Ashton’s original article on the creation of Santiago SwallowHERE